Electrocardiograms, or ECGs, track the heart’s electrical activity through electrodes on the body. Photo: Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Gary Granger Jr./U.S. Navy

When you’re having a heart attack, every second counts. The tightness in your chest intensifies with each passing minute. The clotting blood in your coronary artery, blocked by plaque, steadily builds up. Deprived of oxygen-rich blood, parts of your heart muscle soon slowly begin to die. If surgeons don’t remove the blockage and restore blood flow in time, the clock runs out.

The faster a patient gets treatment, the better. That’s why many EMTs have started using smartphones to email hospitals pictures of electrocardiogram results—paper readouts of the patient’s heartbeat—while they’re still in the ambulance. But emails often take more than a few minutes to reach awaiting doctors, and an error message about a too-big file is the last thing first responders want to see.

To speed treatment, researchers at the University of Virginia bypassed email altogether. They have developed a smartphone app that transmits pictures of ECGs to hospitals in a matter of seconds. They presented their work this morning at the annual American Heart Association’s Quality of Care and Outcomes Research Scientific Sessions in Baltimore.

The team hopes the app will save the lives of patients suffering from a particular type of heart attack that causes heart muscle to die with the passage of time. During this type of attack—ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction, or STEMI—victims’ chances of dying increase by 7.5 percent with every 30 minutes they don’t receive treatment. Doctors can spot signs of a STEMI by studying the squiggly lines of an electrocardiogram printout, which shows the heart’s electrical activity and any of its irregularities.

To get this live-saving document to the emergency room, EMS personnel snap a photo of it with the app using an iPhone camera. The app, designed to maintain high-resolution quality, then compresses it to approximately 32 kilobytes. That’s a pretty small file: you could fit about 62,500 of them on a standard 2-gigabyte flash drive. Once the image has been shrunk, it’s divided into 16 parts, which are sent to the receiving hospital’s server over standard cellphone networks. There, the pieces are reassembled to form a complete image, which doctors can look at it in full using an online interface on their computers.

In 1,500 trials in the Charlottesville area, more than 95 percent of transmissions made it to the hospital in less than 25 seconds. The app consistently outperformed email, whether the cellphone network used was Verizon, Sprint or AT&T. Images were transmitted in four to six seconds, compared to 38 to 114 seconds for actual-size image files.

Both the app and email transfer times slowed when initial picture sizes were bigger or cellphone service petered out, but the STEMI app photo still reached hospital servers first. The trials showed the app had a failure rate of less than .5 percent, while rates for email ranged from 3 percent to 71 percent, depending on the network provider. Next, the researchers hope to test the STEMI app in rural areas, where cellphone service tends to be hard to find.

Mobile technology is making its way steadily into health care: it’s becoming common, for instance, for doctors and nurses to track patient charts on iPads. While the technology has been shown to improve physicians’ work flow, reports also suggest these tools can be a dangerous distraction. But in the field of medicine, most health care professionals can agree that faster emergency treatment, with or without the help of an iPhone, is always better.

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Photo: akirsa

Math haters: If slight electric shocks to your brain would improve your ability to crunch numbers, would you do it? Alternatively, would you sign your child up to undergo this treatment if it meant better grades in algebra class? If new research published in Current Biology pans out, those of us who are not mathematically gifted may someday face these questions. The Guardian reports:

Psychologists at Oxford University found that students scored higher on mental arithmetic tasks after a five-day course of brain stimulation.

If future studies prove that it works – and is safe – the cheap and non-invasive procedure might be used routinely to boost the cognitive power of those who fall behind in maths, the scientists said. Researchers led by Roi Cohen Kadosh zapped students’ brains with a technique called transcranial random noise stimulation (TRNS) while they performed simple calculations, or tried to remember mathematical facts by rote learning.

Twenty-five students received these “gentle” brain shocks, and 26 served as control students, though they believed they were receiving treatment, the Guardian continues. Those who received the real treatment completed math questions 27 percent faster than those who received the placebo, the researchers reported in their paper.

ScienceNOW points out that, while this may sound extreme, electroshock treatment finds use in a range of medical applications:

The idea of using electrical current to alter brain activity is nothing new—electroshock therapy, which induces seizures for therapeutic effect, is probably the best known and most dramatic example. In recent years, however, a slew of studies has shown that much milder electrical stimulation applied to targeted regions of the brain can dramatically accelerate learning in a wide range of tasks, from marksmanship to speech rehabilitation after stroke.

In this latest study, the researchers additionally claimed that at least six of the students who returned to the lab for further testing still enjoyed the mathematical benefits of their treatment six months after it was administered. Other researchers told the Guardian, however, that six is a very small sample number so should not be counted as definitive evidence, so more thorough follow-ups will be needed to confirm that observation.

Even though the amount of electricity used in this study—1 milliamp, just a fraction of the voltage of an AA battery—is very small, ScienceNOW writes, there could be unintended side effects, so researchers discourage overenthusiastic parents from trying the technique at home.

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King Richard III, the leader of England from 1483 to 1485, was the last English king killed in battle—struck by an arrow during a fight for the throne. His body was buried in a church, the Greyfriars in Leicester, but as centuries passed his burial grounds were lost. In September, word came from a team at the University of Leicester that they may have found the dead king’s body, buried beneath a parking lot.

Follow up work, including genetic testing, doubled-down on the assessment, an the question became what to do with the late king’s recently-exhumed remains. Some want him re-buried in Leicester, where he fell. His family wants his body brought to York, to be buried alongside his relatives. But wherever Richard III’s real skull goes, forensic artists working with the Richard III Society in Leicester are trying to make sure his visage is not lost again. They’ve created a bust of Richard III’s head, which will go on tour around England over the next few years.

The reconstructed face of Richard III. Photo: Leicester Arts & Museums

The forensic art team, says the Atlantic, tried to “ determine what the king’s face would have looked like in person (well, “in person”).”

From there, the team used stereolithography – yep, 3D printing — to convert that rendering into a physical model of the king’s face. They extrapolated details like hair color and clothing style from portraits painted during Richard’s time.

The results of this endeavor are fairly creepily Tussaudian: The twisted-spined king, in the form of a 3D-printed bust, looks essentially like a decapitated wax figure. But it’s a high-tech wax figure. The forensics-based model — which, yes, will now be going on a tour throughout England — offers a new perspective on an old story: It brings a new dimension, quite literally, to ancient history.

The first stop of that tour begins today, at the Leicester Guildhall.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Skeleton Found Under a Parking Lot May Be English King Richard III
The Battle Over Richard III’s Bones…And His Reputation

A crazy ant queen. Photo: Joe MacGown, Mississippi Entomological Museum

Since fire ants first invaded the U.S. through cargo ships docking in Mobile, Alabama, the aggressive pest has taken a firm hold in the South and Southwest. More than $5 billion is spent each year on medical treatment and fire ant control, according to Food and Drug Administration, and the ants cost an additional $750 million in agricultural damage.

Now, however, there’s a new ant on the block. The crazy ant – also an invader from South America – is displacing fire ants in the U.S. by gobbling them up. But this unprescribed cure is likely worse than the disease it’s treating. The Los Angeles Times reports:

Like fire ants, these South American invaders seem to be fond of electrical equipment. But unlike their stinging red counterparts, the tawny crazy ants create mega-colonies, sometimes in homes, and push out local populations of ants and arthropods.

Thus  far, the crazy ants are not falling for the traditional poisons used to eliminate fire ant mounds. And when local mounds are destroyed manually, they are quickly regenerated.

Though the crazy ants don’t deliver the same burning bite as fire ants, they do stubbornly make their nests in bathroom plumbing or in walls. So far, researchers haven’t documented any native animals preying on the crazy ants, so their colonies are allowed to run amok, sometimes growing 100 times the size of other species of ants living in the area.

This isn’t the first time one ant invader has been displaced by another. The Argentine ant arrived back in 1891, followed by the black ant in 1918. But the fire ant put an end to those two invasive species when it arrived a couple decades later. Now, the fire ant’s own day of invasive reckoning may have arrived, but rather than feel relieved, researches are worried. Southern ecosystems have had time to adjust to fire ants. Crazy ants—well, who knows what they’ll do?

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There are still some pretty annoying things about being left-handed. But in America, at least, we’ve mostly stopped forcing lefties to learn to use their right hand. That’s not the case everywhere, though. China, for example, claims that less than one percent of students are left-handed. If that were true, it would be strange: the global average of lefties comes in at 10-12 percent. A study in the journal Endeavor recently took on this question: Why are there no left-handers in China? The researchers also looked at India and Islamic countries and discovered that nearly two-thirds of the world’s lefty population faces discrimination.

There’s nothing special about the genetics of people living in China that makes them less likely to be lefties. Chinese-Americans are just as likely to be left handed as any other Americans. The lefties in China are actually switching their dominant hands. Why? Because it’s simply more difficult for them to stick with their naturally dominate hand than for people in Europe of the United States. Many Chinese characters require a right hand, says Discovery News.

Elsewhere, stigma against lefties still exists. Discovery News reports:

 In many Muslim parts of the world, in parts of Africa as well as in India, the left hand is considered the dirty hand and it’s considered offensive to offer that hand to anyone, even to help. The discrimination against lefties goes back thousands of years in many cultures, including those of the West.

Even the word left comes from “lyft” which meant broken. The German words “linkisch” also means awkward. The Russian word “levja” is associated with being untrustworthy. Synonyms for left in Mandarin are things like weird, incorrect and wrong.

And for a long time there were all sorts of ways to “retrain” lefties. An article in The Lancet explains the “scientific” rationales used:

The methods used to obtain this result were often tortuous, including tying a resistant child’s left hand to immobilise it. Typical of the reasoning to justify such practices is a 1924 letter to the British Medical Journal endorsing “retraining” of left-handers to write with their right hands, because otherwise the left-handed child would risk “retardation in mental development; in some cases…actual feeble-mindedness”. As late as 1946 the former chief psychiatrist of the New York City Board of Education, Abram Blau, warned that, unless retrained, left-handed children risked severe developmental and learning disabilities and insisted that “children should be encouraged in their early years to adopt dextrality…in order to become better equipped to live in our right-sided world”.

While today in the United States and Europe, left handed kids aren’t punished and retrained, these same sorts of biases still exist in large parts of the world, proving that righties are just as capable as being sinister as lefties.

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Image: ex_magician

Picture a mountain climber, trekking up Mount Everest. Is he kind of burly? Does he have a beard? He’s probably a man—a white man. That’s about accurate: 78 percent of Americans who took part in activities outdoors last year were white. Only 37 percent of African American kids between 6 and 12 did any sort of outdoor sport, from hiking to fishing.

Expedition Denali, a group of teachers and students dedicated to promoting hiking and outdoor activities among minority groups, just ran a successful Kickstarter to fund 12 teachers and students who will become the first African American team to reach the top of Denali—North America’s highest mountain. Here is their video:

Other organizations are trying to increase the diversity of their outdoor groups as well. Outside Magazine reports on the National Outdoor Leadership School:

In 1994, the Lander, Wyoming, nonprofit devised a diversity program that has since doled out more than $1.5 million in scholarships to help get minority youth into its courses, which teach wilderness and leadership skills through extended adventure trips. “We work hard to recruit young people of color, but we still struggle,” says Aparna Rajagopal-Durbin, who manages NOLS’s diversity program. “There are many barriers, including the lack of role models.” That’s where Expedition Denali comes in, and NOLS has budgeted nearly $250,000 for the group’s efforts.

Another website, Outdoor Afro, tries to encourage minorities to get outdoors as well. The group’s founder, Rue Mapp, explains why she started Outdoor Afro in this NPR interview. Her site describes the group’s purpose this way:

Outdoor Afro is a social community that reconnects African-Americans with natural spaces and one another through recreational activities such as camping, hiking, biking, birding, fishing, gardening, skiing — and more!

Outdoor Afro disrupts the  false perception that black people do not have a relationship with nature, and works to shift the visual representation of who can connect with the outdoors.

Together, these sites and expeditions hope to communicate with communities that don’t tend to participate in hiking, climbing, fishing and biking. And while they acknowledge that 12 people reaching the top of one mountain won’t solve all the problems, it can help raise awareness of the tiny numbers of minorities who hike in the first place.

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This ad for Subway sandwiches reminds you that, unlike their fast food competitors that sell burgers and fries and shakes, Subway is healthy. That seems obvious, since they’re selling sandwiches with lettuce on them while other places sell fattening burgers. But a new study suggests that in fact eating at Subway might be less healthy than eating at McDonald’s.

The study sent a bunch of kids off to the two chains. The researchers tracked what the kids ate and counted the calories. On average, whole meal at McDonald’s added up to 1,038 calories, but Subway wasn’t far behind at 955. And if you take away the extras and sides, Subway starts to lose out. The sandwich the study subjects ordered had 784 calories, while the burger only had 582. And the two meals were similar in other ways too. Here’s the NY Post:

Diners ordered 102g of carbohydrates at Subway compared to 128 at McDonald’s and 36g of sugar to McDonald’s’ 54g.

People ate even more sodium at Subway, with 2,149mg compared to 1,829mg at McDonald’s. Overconsumption of salt is a growing health crisis for Americans, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has warned, putting children and adults at risk for hypertension, heart disease and obesity. One CDC study found the average kid consumers 3,300mg of salt daily, far more than the recommended 2,300mg.

Now, the sides, extras and drinks do seem to differ between Subway and McDonald’s. At Subway, participants purchased 61 calories worth of sugary drinks, while at McDonald’s they bought 151 calories. Subway usually serves chips as a side, while McDonald’s offers fries. And the teens were asked to buy a “meal,” which usually means more than a sandwich or burger.

Of course, Subway wasn’t totally happy with the study. It responded to the work saying:

“[We] want to clarify a few things. As long time leaders in offering customers healthier options, Subway restaurants has always provided customers nutritional information on all of our menu offerings along with a wide array of great-tasting, low-fat and low-calorie subs and salads.”

And the study authors aren’t really out to get Subway in particular. They want everyone to stop eating at these restaurants in general. Their conclusions state:

We found that, despite being marketed as “healthy,” adolescents purchasing a meal at Subway order just as many calories as at McDonald’s. Although Subway meals had more vegetables, meals from both restaurants are likely to contribute to overeating.

Stay in and make your own sandwich or burger, the authors say, and you’ll be far better off.

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Pregnancy tests did not always come in an easy-to-use, sterile kit that provided almost immediate results. Less than a century ago, women had to rely upon frogs instead. In 1938, Dr. Edward R. Elkan wrote in the British Medical Journal:

The discovery of what is now known as the xenopus pregnancy test is based on experiments conducted by Hogben (1930, 1931), who observed that hypophysectomy produced ovarian retrogression, and the injection of anterior pituitary extracts ovulation, in the female South African clawed toad.

The African clawed frog, as its better known today, was imported around the world for its use in pregnancy tests. Doctors would ship urine samples to frog labs, where technicians would inject female frogs with a bit of the urine into their hind leg. The animals would be placed back into their tanks, and in the morning the technicians would check for tell-tale frog eggs dotting the water. If the female frog had ovulated, that meant the woman who provided the urine was pregnant and the pregnancy hormone, human chorionic gonadotropin, had kicked off ovulation in the frog. Researchers referred to this procedure as the Hogben test.

Among the 295 tests which I have done so far and in which 2,112 frogs were used I have not seen one clear positive that did not indicate a pregnancy. There were a few negative results which when repeated after a fortnight became positive, but I do not think that these can be regarded as failures.

Frogs were actually a great improvement on the previous means of testing whether or not a woman was pregnant.   Welcome History describes:

Prior to Xenopus, female mice and rabbits had been used, but these had to be slaughtered, dissected and carefully examined for ovarian changes. Because toads were reusable and could be conveniently kept in aquaria, Xenopus made pregnancy testing practical on a larger scale than before.

Thousands of the frogs were exported across the world from the 1930s to 1950s for use as pregnancy testers.

Immunological test kits finally replaced Xenopus in the 1960s and were rapidly taken up by private companies and feminist organisations offering diagnostic services directly to women. The first over-the-counter home test was sold in pharmacies in the early 1970s, but it resembled a small chemistry set and so was not user-friendly. It was not until 1988 that the first recognisably ‘modern’ one-step-stick hit the shelves.

But the frogs’ legacy lives on. African clawed frogs can be found living around many urban centers today, where they were likely released into the wild after hospitals no longer had use for them. Additionally, the imported frogs are common pets, and no doubt some of those pets wear out their welcome and get chucked into a local stream or pond.

In 2006, researchers realized that the frog may be carriers for the deadly amphibian chytrid fungus, which has caused the extinction and decline of around 200 amphibian species around the world. Now, research published in PLoS One shows for the first time that populations of African clawed frogs living in California carry the fungus. The frogs can carry the disease for long periods without being affected themselves, so researchers suspect that they may be the original vectors that introduced the fungus around the world—a sort of revenge for being used as egg-laying research subjects for all those years.

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For the first time in human history the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide has reached 400 parts per million. Photo: Mauna Loa Observatory

There’s an interesting relationship, borne out in polling numbers, between the “general public’s” belief in global climate change and the weather. When it’s hot out, people believe in climate change. When it’s cold, they don’t.  When summer heat and drought and wildfires tore through the U.S. last summer, 74 percent of Americans believed that climate change was affecting the weather. Only 46 percent of Americans think that this climate change is caused by human activities – most directly the burning of fossil fuels.

The numbers are a little different when it is climate scientists, and the scientific research conducted on climate change, that are polled.

Writing in the Guardian, Dana Nuccitelli and John Abraham describe a new study that polled the recent research to see what scientists thought of climate change. (Nuccitelli is one of the voices behind the website Skeptical Science and one of the authors of the new scientific study.) They found that the vast, overwhelming majority of climate scientists agree that humans are causing climate change.

The team searched a database of scientific studies for the words “global climate change” or “global warming.” They found 11,944 relevant studies published between 1991 and 2012. Then, they read through the study’s summaries to figure out whether the study supported, rejected, was uncertain about or said nothing at all about our role in causing climate change. They also asked the scientists behind the papers whether their research supported or refuted the idea of man-made global warming.

Of the studies that expressed some sort of position on global warming, of which there were 4,000, the team write in their paper, “97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.” When the climate scientists themselves said whether or not their work supported the idea of anthropogenic climate change, “97.2% endorsed the consensus.”

For the papers that didn’t seem to have an opinion on whether humans were causing climate change, the reason, they write, is not that the scientists don’t know. Rather, it’s that the debate is so fully and completely settled within the scientific community that they aren’t going to use space re-hashing old fights.

Some people may mention that the scientific community is conflicted over the cause of climate change. This new survey would like to remind that that is not true.

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The village of Gorak Shep. Photo: Frank Kehren

There is no plumbing on Mount Everest. When nature calls, climbers must use makeshift holes dug by sherpas, or use buckets as substitute toilets. With the ever-increasing number of climbers attempting to scale the mountain, containing all of that human waste is no small problem.

Currently, National Geographic reports, much of the excrement is carried in sealed containers on the backs of porters to the nearby village of Gorak Shep (which also lacks plumbing or sanitation facilities), where it is emptied into open pits. Up to 12 metric tons of the stuff can be hauled to Gorak Shep in a single year. But the village is running out of space for containing the mess, and last year researchers discovered that the refuse had contaminated one of the village’s two major water sources.  

Seattle climber and engineer Garry Porter witnessed the problem first hand when he attempted to scale Everest ten years ago. Since then, the image of all of that waste has stuck with him. ”I couldn’t shake the feeling that my final tribute to Nepal and the people of Everest was having my waste dumped in these open pits. It just didn’t seem right,” he told National Geographic.

Porter decided to found the Mount Everest Biogas Project as a potential fix, along with Everest guide Dan Mazur.

In biogas production, bacteria feed on organic waste (like feces) and produce several gases as a byproduct. One of these is methane, which is the primary component of natural gas and can be burned for heat and light, or converted to electricity. One cubic meter of biogas provides about two kilowatt-hours of useable energy. This is enough to power a 60-watt light bulb for more than a day, or an efficient 15-watt CFL bulb for nearly six days. A biogas reactor at Gorak Shep could address the fecal contamination problem while providing the perennially low-income community with a sustainable source of methane gas for energy, especially for cooking, Porter says.

The team plans to keep the biogas digester tanks warm (they stop working if temperatures drop below freezing) with solar panels.

In addition to getting rid of all the feces, the team hopes that the biogas project will relieve some of the pressure on Everest’s natural resources. All of those poop-producing climbers also need to eat, and cooking fuel often takes the form of native plants harvested around Everest, including an endangered species, the alpine juniper. If successful, the project will be the world’s highest elevation biogas reactor and could be introduced to other high altitude areas around the world.  

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Timmins, Ontario, has a long history as a mining town. Photo: Michael Jacobs

In the small city of Timmins, Ontario, a town nestled half way between Michigan and Hudson Bay, there is a mine. Actually, there are many mines—it’s a mining town. But this story is about just one, a mile and a half deep, where there is water bubbling up from below that has been cut off from the rest of the world for at least a billion years—maybe as much as 2.6 billion years.

The longer end of that timeline, Ivan Semeniuk points out in the Globe and Mail, is about half the age of the Earth. This water hasn’t been in contact with the rest of the planet since before the rise of multicellular life.

But like the water trapped in frozen lakes below Antarctica’s massive ice sheets, researchers suspect there might be life in these flows.

“It’s been called the Galapagos of the subsurface,” says Barbara Sherwood Lollar to New Scientist. The water, “is packed with hydrogen and methane – chemicals that microbes love to eat.”

“What we have here,” says Sherwood Lollar, a microbiologist at the University of Toronto in Canada, “is a plate of jelly donuts.” While she has yet to confirm whether the water is inhabited, she says the conditions are perfect for life.

The scientists don’t know whether there is any life in the ancient, isolated water. But they’re working on it. The water is young enough that it would have been locked away after life arose on Earth. But it’s been trapped for so long that any life that does exist would likely be unique—a relic of an ancient world. The CBC:

Some Canadian members of the team are currently testing the water to see if it contains microbial life — if they exist, those microbes may have been isolated from the sun and the Earth’s surface for billions of years and may reveal how microbes evolve in isolation.

One can’t help but be reminded of the Balrog: “Moria! Moria! Wonder of the Northern world. Too deep we delved there, and woke the nameless fear.”

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The Kepler satellite’s first photo, captured on April 8, 2009. Photo: NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech

It’s been just over four years since NASA’s exoplanet-hunting Kepler satellite switched on and began staring unwaveringly at the same patch of the universe, watching for the subtle dips of light caused by a far-off planet passing in front of its star. Where the ancient Greeks knew of five planets besides our own Kepler gave us thousands. Extrapolations from this tiny patch of sky gave us hints of billions more.

Originally designed to run for three-and-a-half years, Kepler has pushed on. But the satellite’s quest may be at an end. Sad news came out from NASA yesterday that one of the satellite’s reaction wheels, a device that keeps Kepler’s eye steady, has failed. There may still be a way to fix the broken wheel or concoct some other strategy to keep Kepler shooting straight. But without a steady gaze the satellite can no longer carry out its mission.

In the science press, the obituaries are already rolling out. Though many scientific experiments teach us something new about the world, few have been able to so clearly redefine our place in the universe as Kepler. Decades ago, the planets in our solar system were all we knew. Now, we’re practically swimming in them.

Kepler may be down (but not “out”), but that doesn’t mean the discoveries will stop. It will take years to sort through and analyze all the data the mission has already collected. And, follow up research using other satellites on Kepler’s exoplanet “candidates” could still yet unveil the marvels of the universe.

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What if All 2,299 Exoplanets Orbited One Star?

Photo: wanderflechten

In 1700, a massive earthquake struck the west and northwest coast of the United Sates. Modern scientists first caught wind of the natural disaster through the scars it left on the land—massive, toppled red cedar trees and sand deposits washed far inland. Written records weren’t being kept in that region when the earthquake happened, but several years ago, scientists managed to pinpoint the date of that mysterious earthquake. In 2005, Smithsonian explained how they unraveled the mystery:

In Japan, officials had recorded an “orphan” tsunami—unconnected with any felt earthquake— with waves up to ten feet high along 600 miles of the Honshu coast at midnight, January 27, 1700. Several years ago, Japanese researchers, by estimating the tsunami’s speed, path and other properties, concluded that it was triggered by a magnitude 9 earthquake that warped the seafloor off the Washington coast at 9 p.m. Pacific Standard Time on January 26, 1700. To confirm it, U.S. researchers found a few old trees of known age that had survived the earthquake and compared their tree rings with the rings of the ghost forest cedars. The trees had indeed died just before the growing season of 1700.

The earthquake occurred along the Cascadia Subduction Zone, a major fault line running from the Pacific Northwest to Vancouver. In recent decades, scientists have determined that this fault line may produce mega-earthquakes of 9.0 or higher on the Richter scale.

Considering all the geologic evidence, scientists now say a major earthquake strikes the Pacific Northwest every few hundred years—give or take a few hundred years. That means the next one could strike tomorrow.

This is why researchers hope to learn as much as they can, as quickly as they can about the devastating quake that rocked the land back in 1700. Earthquake prediction remains notoriously sketchy (just look at the recent example of researchers in Italy who failed to predict an earthquake in L’Aquila), so the more scientists can learn about what happened in the past, the better prepared they can be for the next disaster. And that next one could be coming soon, according to new research:

The Cascadia subduction zone is of particular interest to geologists and coastal managers because geological evidence points to recurring seismic activity along the fault line, with intervals between 300 and 500 years. With the last major event occurring in 1700, another earthquake could be on the horizon. A better understanding of how such an event might unfold has the potential to save lives.

The University of Pennsylvania team turned to a fossil-based technique for studying the Cascadia Subduction Zone. They took core samples throughout the region and then picked through the samples to find microscopic foraminifera fossils, a  type of single-celled aquatic protist. They used radiocarbon dating to estimate the age of these ancient creatures and to recreate past changes in land and sea level along the coastline. Through their analyses, they saw that the coastline ruptured in a heterogenous manner, or that the earthquake struck in different locations with different severity.

The earthquakes that occurred in this part of North America, they report, behaved similarly to recent major earthquakes in Japan and Chile, which arrived with very little warning. While the results are useful for modeling and understanding the next West Coast mega-earthquake, the researchers warn that some areas in Oregon will likely have just 20 minutes to evacuate before the tsunami waves arrive.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Future Shocks 
Hurricanes May Cause Earthquakes

Image: Facebook

Those who logged into Facebook recently might have noticed some new faces—emoticons that users can now tack on to their status updates. These emoticons are highly engineered: Facebook teamed up with a Pixar illustrator and a psychologist to make the most emotive emoticons it could.

UC Berkeley psychology professor Dacher Keltner studies how people emotionally interact on social media. Pixar illustrator Matt Jones knows all too well how to manipulate our emotions with little animated characters. Together, they created the set of emoticons that Facebook settled on. Popular Science reports:

They started looking at how compassion research could help Facebook address the kind of interpersonal conflicts the company saw emerge in issue reporting. When people inserted a little more emotion into their messages asking friends to take down photos, Facebook found, the friend was more likely to respond or comply rather than just ignore the message.

So Facebook started thinking about how to add more emotional information to Facebook messaging. “There’s all this communication that happens when you’re talking to someone face-to-face–you can see that they’re nodding and you can see their smile–that is not present when you’re communicating electronically,” Bejar explains. “One of the questions that we asked was, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we had a better emoticon that was informed by science?’”

Of course, Pixar and Facebook aren’t the first ones to think of using emoticons to help people express emotions. That’s what the things were invented for. Mashable has a brief history of emoticons, which traces the murky beginnings of the little faces. A transcript of one of Abraham Lincoln speeches included a winking face, but most agree that was probably just a typo. Mashable writes:

Various reports (that we’ve been unable to verify) suggest that in 1979, an ARPANET user called Kevin MacKenzie, inspired by an unidentified Reader’s Digest article, suggested using punctuation to hint that something was “tongue-in-cheek,” as opposed to out-and-out humorous.

Apparently, MacKenzie thought a hypen and a bracket — -) — would be a suitable symbol: “If I wish to indicate that a particular sentence is meant with tongue-in-cheek, I would write it so: ‘Of course you know I agree with all the current administration’s policies -).’

Last year, the classic yellow smiley face turned 30. It was originally the face of State Mutual Life Assurance Company. ABC News explains:

The “smiley face” designed by Harvey Ball has become a ubiquitous symbol since the Worcester, Mass., designer was hired by the e State Mutual Life Assurance Company to design a morale-boosting symbol for the company. Ball’s design, which was first used on buttons, desk cards and posters, has since become a lasting international symbol.

Today, Facebook has added a bit of science to that yellow smiley. And they tackled some emotions that aren’t usually represented by emoticons, like sympathy and gratefulness. Here’s Popular Science again:

Sympathy, for example, can be hard to really get across in traditional emoticon form. “It’s an under-appreciated emotion in Western culture,” Keltner explains. “We now know what it looks like and sounds like because of science. They created this dynamic emoticon that when you see it, it’s really powerful.”

Using little pictures to convey feeling, rather than words, might elicit more of a personal response from users. Or, at least, that’s what Facebook hopes.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Who Really Invented the Smiley Face?

Photo: dynna17

In elementary school, we learn that caterpillars turn into butterflies and moths through a process called metamorphosis. But what really goes on within the hardened chrysalis has continued to puzzle scientists. Now, computer tomography scans have allowed researchers to peep in on the caterpillar-to-butterfly action taking place inside the chrysalis, The Scientist reports.

Previously, researchers hoping to learn about metamorphosis had to dissect the chrysalis, which killed the developing insect inside. The key breakthrough about this new technique, they say, is that it allows them to study living tissue as it grows and changes.

Using series of dead individuals provides snapshots of presumably sequential development, but it can be unclear whether one insect’s third day in a chrysalis is really the same developmentally as another’s. CT scans can provide a more complete picture of how development proceeds.

In this new study, the team scanned nine painted lady chrysalises. Four of the insects died during the experiment while the other five hatched. In their results, the researchers focused on data derived from one of the insects in particular that provided the most detailed scans.

Here’s a video the researchers put together of their caterpillar’s gradual development into butterfly:

Rather than rewriting the story of butterfly development, the researchers told The Scientist, this experiment fills in missing details. For example, The Scientist describes:

The trachea did become visible surprisingly fast, within 12 hours after pupation, indicating that the structures either are more fully formed in caterpillars than previously thought or form very rapidly in pupae. While the trachea and the intestines showed up remarkably clearly, the “soft, gooey bits,” such as muscles and the central nervous system, were unfortunately invisible, Garwood said.

Lepidopterists, the scientists who study butterflies and moths, are not the only insect researchers who can benefit from CT scans. Many other arthropods—including beetles, flies, bees, wasps, ants and fleas—also go through metamorphosis.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Female Butterflies Can Sniff Out Inbred Males